When Is the Chinese New
Year

It may sound strange, but
it is true: few Chinese can tell when the Chinese New Year is each year without
referring to a Chinese calendar. Therefore, you cannot talk of the Chinese New
Year without mentioning the Chinese calendar first.

A Chinese calendar consists
of both the Western Gregorian and an indigeneous lunar-solar calendrical systems.
The Chinese lunar-solar calendar divides a year into twelve month of 30 or 29
days. Adding a leap month every seven years, it coordinates well with the Western
calendar. The dual-system calendar reflects the Chinese ingenuity.

A Chinese calendar
will not be complete without a twenty-four jieqi (solar terms) system
closely related to the changes of Mother Nature—a very useful tool for
farmers, telling them when to plant and harvest.

The twenty-four
jieqi (solar terms) have fifteen days each. The first is called Lichun
(Beginning of Spring) The first day of Lichun is the Chinese New Year's
Day and the entire jieqi is the Chinese New Year season. The climax of the New
Year usually lasts three to five days. Find out from the following table when
the Chinese New Year will be in the coming years:

2007:

February
18

2008:

February
07

2009:

January
26

2010:

February
14

2011:

February
03

2012:

January
23

2013:

February
10

2014:

January
31

2015:

February 19

2016:

February 08

Visit this perpetual calendar to look for Chinese New Year dates in the past or in the future.

On the Chinese
Calendar, you will also find such terminology as Tiangan (Heavenly
Stem) and Dizhi (Earthly Branch), a peculiar Chinese way of counting
the years. A combination of 12 Tiangan and 10 Dizhi creates
a 60-year cycle, and time progresses in a cyclical instead of a linear fashion,
as is true with the Western calendar. To help remember the years created with
the combination of the symbols of Tiangan and Dizhi, the Chinese
assign an animal to each of the 12 years with a different symbol of Tiangan.
The animals are Rat, Ox, Tiger, Hare, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster,
Dog and Boar.

The Chinese New Year is
now popularly known as the Spring Festival because it starts from the Begining
of Spring, the first of the 24 jieqi. Its origin is too
old to be traced. Several explanations are hanging around. All agree, however,
that the word nian (year) was originally the name of a monster that
started to prey on people the night before the beginning of a new year in accordance
with the Chinese calendar.

One legend goes
that the monster nian had a very big mouth that would swallow a great
many people with one gulp. People were very scared. One day, an old man came
to their rescue, offering to subdue nian. When n ian came,
he said to it, "I hear that you are very resourceful, but can you swallow the
other beasts of prey on earth instead of people who are by no means of your
worthy opponents?" So, nian eliminated a great number of the beasts
that had preyed on people and their domestic animals and drove what was left
into the depth of forests and mountains.

Then, the old
man mounted the beast and left. He turned out to be an Immortal. Now that nian
was gone and other beasts of prey were also scared into forests, people began
to enjoy their peaceful life. Before the old man's departure, he had told them
to put up red paper decorations on their windows and doors, and burn bamboos
to make cracking noises before a new year to deter nian from sneaking
back, for red was the color the beast feared the most.

The tradition
of observing the conquest of the beast nian has been carried on from
generation to generation. The term guonian, which originally meant
"survive the nian" has gradually become "celebrate the (New) Year"
as the word guo has a double meaning of "pass-over" and "observe."
Today, the custom of pasting red paper (now couplets with words of good wishes)
and firing fire-crackers is still going strong. However, people have long forgotten
why they are doing all this, except that they feel the color and the sound add
a lot to the excitement of the New Year celebration.

Traditions of Chinese
New Year

Even though the climax
of the Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival, lasts only three or five days,
including the New Year's Eve, the New Year season extends from the late twelfth
month of the previous year to the middle of the first month of the new year.
A month before the New Year is a good time for shopping. People will pour out
their money to buy presents, decorations, food and clothing. Transportation
department, railroad in particular, is nervously waiting for the onslaught of
a billion travellers who take their days off around the New Year to rush back
home for a family renunion from all parts of the country.

Days before the
New Year, every household gives its house a thorough cleaning, hoping to sweep
away all the ill-fortune there may have been to make way for the wishful in-coming
good luck. People also give their doors and window-panes a new paint, usually
in red color. They paste on their doors paper-cuts and spring
couplets with the popular themes of "happiness", "wealth", "longevity" "officialdom,"
and "satisfactory marriage with more children". Paintings of the same themes
are put up on the walls of their bedrooms. In traditional families, various
kinds of food are offered at the alta of ancestors and gods.

The Eve of the New Year
is very carefully observed. Supper is a feast, with all family members around
a round table. An increasing number of families choose to have their New Year
feast in a restaurant. The main course is jiaozi, dumplings boiled
in water. Jiaozi means "the coming of the time of zi" in Chinese. Zi is a Dizhi symbol that marked the time of midnight, the
beginning of a day. In this case, it is the day of a new year! Since the middle
of 1980's, watching a TV gala produced by the China Central TV station has become
part of the tradition of a Chinese New Year celebration. After midnight, it
is time for the whole family to sit up while having fun playing cards or board
games, or simply chatting. Incidentally, young people today are having a lot
of parties with their peers outside their own families. Every light in the house
is supposed to be kept on. When the clock strikes twelve, the entire sky will
be lit up by fireworks and firecrackers. The light and cracking can make a whole
city or village look and sound like a war zone. People's excitement reach its
zenith. Some urban areas today begin to ban fireworks and firecrackers for the
sake of public safety.

At the daybreak of the
New Year, children greet their parents and receive from them presents of cash
wrapped up in red paper packages. Then, the family will extend their greetings
from door to door, first to their relatives and then their neighbors. In the
first few days of the New Year, people are visiting each other to express their
New Year greetings. Since China has the second largest owners of cellphones,
sending short messages and making a call has increasingly taking the place of
physical visits. New Year is a time of gift exchange. Gifts used to be more
of monetary value. Today, flowers are becoming increasingly popular. The visits
provide a great opportunity for reconciliation. Old grudges are very easily
cast away during the greetings while the air is permeated with warmth, friendliness,
and forgiveness.

The time before
the Chinese New Year is also a good occasion to clear old debts. Traditionally,
Chinese believed in self-sufficiency. Owing debts to others was a disgrace,
a notion unthinkable to people in the modern world where credit is the order
of the day. As the New Year set in, owners of businesses and individuals would
start to settle their account and get ready to pay back their creditors as much
as possible if not in full. As market economy is catching up, this pratice still
provides a practical chance of reorganizing one's own finance. Nevertheless,
living without credit is becoming a fairytale to the younger generation of the
Chinese, particularly those in the cities, for some of them are now having a
mortgage, and most a few plastics.

For a traditional family,
the Chinese New Year is ladden with taboos. Customs and superstitions vary from
regions to regions. The following snapshots of practices are based on my childhood
recollection of the New Year celebrations with my parents and grandparents in
a northern Chinese rural village.

People, especially adults,
will stay up the night during the New Year's Eve, with as many lights lit
as possible inside and outside the house. This practice dubbed as "Observe
the Night" is prevalent throughout the country. People expect gods to visit
them and bring along with good luck. They fear that they may not be able to
find their way in total darkness. (People in the West may be a little smarter
by hanging out stockings and let them do the hard job of staying up for Santa,
the gift-giver?)

Many people will paste
a red-paper poster with an upside-down Chinese character fu (Happiness)
written on it on places that would most likely catch people's attention, such
as the door. They would expect visitors to comment that it is posted "upside-down".
The pronunciation of "upside-down" in Chinese is the same as "comes" or "arrives."
The visitor's unintentional utterance now becomes "Happiness comes (to your
household)," a New Year greeting to the owner of the poster. It is perhaps
as smart a trick as some households in United States put up a stop sign post
in front of their house, hoping to intercept Santa for his gifts or else

Unruly kids will stumble
into a lot of taboos. One thing I remember was that they should not speak
bad or unlucky words. If they happened to blurt out some, an adult would waste
no time wiping his or her mouth with toilet paper to annul the utterance

Things white have to
be covered up because white is the color of mourning in Chnese culture. The
white thing that I still remember vividly is the grinding stones in the family
mill

Houses are thoroughly
cleaned before the New Year's Eve. No one is supposed to pick up the broom
on the New Year's Day for fear that he or she may sweep good luck and fortune
out of his or her house. The New Year celebration reaches another climax 15
days from the New Year's Day. It is the Festival of Lanterns, an occasion
of lantern shows and folk dances everywhere in the country. One typical food
for this festival is called tangyuan (ball-shaped dumplings in soup).
It is made of glutinous rice rolled into shapes and sizes like ping-pong balls
stuffed mostly with sweet and nutty fillings.

The Lantern Festival marks
the end of the New Year season, and after it, life becomes daily routines once
again.

This description
the Chinese New Year celebration may be very limited to my person experience,
and the Chinese New Year tradtion may vary from place to place, people to people.
But, the spirit underlying the diverse Chinese New Year cultures is the same:
a sincere wish of peace and happiness for the family members and friends.